I’d suggest that the key words are actually “company values and policy.”
And you would see that kind of reception on the forums as well, in roughly the same proportion, if the forum norms and rules hadn’t been shaped by CoG company policy. The grumbles about “SJW politics taking over the story” get moderated out on the forum in a way that they aren’t by Apple or Google. The forumgoers who are eager to explain why inclusiveness is a good thing have free rein to do so. That’s the “crowd” you’re talking about, and it has the voice it has because of CoG’s values; it’s not the explanation for those values.
I’d agree with the authors who’ve suggested above that the mass market for IF broadly tends to reward “maximum capacity to self-insert”… or at least “don’t you lock me into your main character, Mr Author, I’m the one role-playing here” (which isn’t quite the same thing but rewards the same degree of flex). But the broader market would clearly tolerate a lot less social inclusiveness than CoG policy requires.
As a company, CoG has made its own deliberate choice to aim for a subset of that broader market… to publish particularly for the fans who rejoice that “for the almost-first time I get to play someone like me!” and also, “Wow, that doesn’t force me into a story that’s all about oppression! I can have exactly the same hero’s journey as anyone else!”
Although as noted above the company’s inclusiveness criteria have broadened over time, the values driving them in that direction have been there from Choice of the Dragon onwards. And as a CoG partner said elsewhere on this forum, the fact that “inclusiveness” choices come at the beginning and often have a light impact on the rest of the story is a feature, not a bug. The purpose of inclusive choices isn’t to give different stories to different kinds of readers; it’s to welcome them in, to make clear that this story really can be about them if they want it to be.
So why hasn’t CoG policy (yet) encompassed other axes of real-world exclusion like disability, old age, body type, neurotype, etc. in the same way as ethnicity, gender, and orientation? I’m sure it’s been discussed, given the company values, and I’d be interested in hearing whatever their latest thoughts are. I’d hazard a guess that part of it is that those feel harder to implement in a “cosmetic” way with minimal variation in the story; it’s a much bigger resource commitment to write for a blind or autistic MC, because you can’t just set some variables to pop in pronouns etc. from time to time.
The text-based sequential choice interface also puts some limits on character generation, as it can easily murder story momentum if you try to cram too much in there. A graphical interface makes it a bit easier to tinker with multiple variables to the player’s content while keeping the interruption to the story tolerable if still mockable. So priorities have to be drawn somewhere. I’d be interested in CoG’s latest thoughts on what makes the priority list and why.